Tzemach Committee hopes plan would force partners to compete against each other, each selling its share of gas.
By Itai Trilnick

Government finds solution for gas monopoly: Split Leviathan, Tamar among partners
Tzemach Committee hopes plan would force partners to compete against each other, each selling its share of gas.
By Itai Trilnick

In the fairly near future, Israel will be reliant on a single source of natural gas – the Tamar field – which means the partners owning rights there have a monopoly over the supply. What to do about this? The Tzemach Committee, set up six months ago to formulate recommendations on Israel’s gas policy, had a fresh idea: Split up the ownership among the partners – and force them to compete against each other, each selling its share of gas.

Of course, this form of competition will be inferior to competition between rival companies that don’t share business interests, the committee admits in its interim report, filed last week. “But selling separately is better than for the partners to sell jointly.”

The Tzemach Committee didn’t touch on commercial aspects beyond that. But the upshot is that Yitzhak Tshuva’s Delek Group and the Texas-based company Noble Energy, which have worked in partnership, may have to split their activities in Tamar and Leviathan as well.

Both are deep-sea fields of natural gas discovered in the seabed of the Mediterranean. Neither is productive yet. Production from Tamar is expected to start next year and, in fact, the partners have been lining up clients – the chief ones being the Israel Electric Corporation and industrial giants such as Israel Corporation, which owns Oil Refineries and Israel Chemicals (both huge consumers of fuel ).

It is true, the committee acknowledged, that analysis of the suppliers and their holdings in Israel’s gas economy indicate that creating sustainable competition won’t be easy. That said, competition is key to safeguarding the public interest, the committee wrote.